by Bell Davina
Lola has a dimple so deep you could stick your whole finger into it. Her parents are from Mauritius and her skin is dark and her hair is the most beautiful cloud of crazy-tight curls. Her eyes are sort of sparkly, like she’s winking at you except she’s not, and she is tall – even taller than Belle. Everyone wants to be her friend – even people who only meet her for three-and-a-half seconds. It’s not just because she has great taste in fashion. Or because she makes the best earrings. It’s not even because her big sister, Tally, has her own YouTube channel with almost a million subscribers. (She posts videos where she sings songs and plays the ukulele while hanging upside-down off a specially made towel rail.) It’s because Lola is warm and funny and when she talks to you, you feel like you’re really special. I can’t remember who made it up, but we call it the Lola Effect.
Lola got in to Clives, a really famous art school, because of these big black-and-white murals she used to make. Last year she saw a guy on the news who painted giant life-like portraits on the side of those huge wheat silos in country towns. They’re so real they look like photos. Lola taught herself how to do them on the side of her house, and then lots of businesses in Sunnystream asked her to put them on their walls, including the Sunnystream Post Office. Her mum was so proud, she used to always put photos of Lola’s work on Instagram. But Maisie says Lola’s not doing them anymore. I ditched my phone at the end of summer, so I wouldn’t know. As in, I literally threw it out of my tree house. Long story. Now Lola lives on the other side of the city with her cool aunt, Claire, to be closer to Clives, and she hardly ever comes home at weekends.
‘So, what’s he like, this “boyfriend”?’ Lola asks Belle suspiciously, taking another chocolate cupcake.
‘His name’s Pete. He’s smart,’ says Belle, ‘and he plays in an improvisational jazz quartet. He’s currently away hiking with his family in northern Pakistan. He was the head boy of his primary school. And he has an Instagram account just for pics of inspirational graffiti.’
Lola’s eyebrows shoot up, because she loves inspirational quotes AND social media. She’s obsessed with her phone. It’s in her hand right now because she just Instagrammed the cupcakes.
‘And he only has one eye,’ Belle concludes.
‘What does “improvisational” mean?’ calls Maisie. I should have mentioned that since she finished her cupcake, she’s been doing back-walkovers on the fence rail. Maisie never sits still unless she’s coding, and she can even do that while she’s balancing on something.
‘Improvisational means making stuff up,’ says Lola. ‘What do you mean one eye? Like, he lost it or he never had it? Isn’t that weird?’
‘One eye isn’t weird. Like that kid in Wonder,’ I say. Wonder was our favourite book in year five, and if you haven’t read it, you seriously should.
‘He never had it,’ Belle says briskly. ‘And honestly, you don’t notice it after two seconds because he’s a dream. Any other questions, or shall we get back to the agenda?’
I have heaps of questions – like, so many. What’s it like to have a boyfriend? How do you know when somebody wants to go out with you, or if they’re just being nice or friendly or whatever?
‘Have you kissed yet?’ calls Maisie, who is always after details.
‘Once, closed lips. No spit, no tongue, no regrets,’ Belle says. ‘Right, item two on our agenda. Maisie, get over here. Next up is the Kumon Issue.’
Maisie cartwheels over, then sits down and hugs her knees, tucking her face into them. That’s a classic Maisie pose. She’s not shy at all but you might think that at first because she hates any kind of attention. Gracie would have said that’s ironic, because Maisie is a gymnast and when she competes, the entire stadium stops to stare. She’s in Team Future, which is the serious squad for gymnasts from all around Australia. She trains twenty-two hours a week, before school and after, too. When I see her do gym, I get the same feeling as when I look up at the stars in the countryside. Like you can’t believe something could ever be so perfect – it makes your heart hurt a little and your throat get tight, it’s that beautiful.
Maisie is my BFF and in case you can’t tell, I am SUPER proud of her. At primary school, if we had to choose partners, it was me and Maisie together, and Belle and Lola, who love each other, but kind of drive each other nuts and couldn’t be more different. Maisie still lives in Sunnystream, behind her parents’ antique shop, but she goes to school in Cloud Town, which is the next suburb over. Her parents chose it because of the music program and how well the kids do academically. She’s in about seventy-seven string quartets, which is pretty funny because she’s actually tone deaf, and I’m not saying that to be mean. I’m saying it as someone who has played a lot of SingStar with her. She’s trying to learn the drums so she can switch to the big brass band, but it’s hard to fit in anything else around all her gym.
At the end of the last holidays, her parents told her that she couldn’t train on Wednesdays anymore because it was clashing with Kumon. Kumon is this special after-school maths program that’s supposed to make you into a child genius who becomes a dentist. Maisie says it just makes her want to cry. Her parents don’t want her to quit gymnastics if it makes her happy, but they also care a lot about schoolwork because neither of them got the chance to go to uni. They told my mum about it at the Don’t Panic It’s Organic stand at the school fair last year.
‘Well, my parents say I have to do Kumon Plus on Wednesdays again this term,’ says Maisie. ‘But Coach Sanders said that if I miss Wednesday practice, I won’t get to train with Coach Jack.’
We all make the kind of sounds that say ‘oh no’, because we know what that means. Coach Jack is the best coach in our district. He was Gracie’s coach, too, before she got obsessed with baseball and quit gym. Coach Jack actually reckons Maisie could get to the Olympics one day, but right now the next step is going from Level 9 to Level 10. That’s a huge deal, because there are only ten levels. After that it’s the Nationals. Maisie says Coach Jack makes her believe she can do anything – that maybe she really could get to the Olympics. But Lola is more interested in his man bun. ‘Long hair is so hot,’ she sighs whenever we bring him up.
‘No Coach Jack, no Olympics,’ says Belle briskly. ‘Well, we’re just not going to let that happen. How are your grades going?’
Maisie isn’t dumb. When she says she is, it really hurts my heart – like, I can actually feel it. She just isn’t a total genius at schoolwork like her big sister, April, who is totally on track to be a dentist. And her other big sister, June, who is currently at Junior Astronaut Camp in the Florida Keys.
‘Umm,’ Maisie says, rubbing her eyes with her palms.
For the zillionth time I wonder how she can even stay awake at school. To get to training she has to catch two buses, and the second one doesn’t even leave from the place where the first one stops. She has to run across a shopping centre car park in the dark. But Maisie isn’t scared of anything. And she’s REALLY good at not getting caught doing anything bad. Belle always says Maisie would make a good assassin, which is someone who kills people in a silent, sneaky way. That’s why one of her nicknames is Killer.
‘Well, my marks aren’t … great,’ says Maisie.
‘It must be hard to maximise study windows when you’re training all the time,’ says Belle. ‘My new friend Matilda’s a rower so I totally get that. She has to get up at four in the morning too.’
‘Horrifying,’ says Lola, who can sleep till noon, easy. She takes a selfie wearing Maisie’s cat-ears beanie.
‘Can you put that thing away?’ asks Belle.
‘Sorry, guys. Just putting this on Snaps. Gotta –’
‘Keep the streak going,’ we say, because we’ve heard her say it ten million times before.
‘Well, you’re giving off vibes that you don’t even care about the Kumon Issue,’ says Belle.
‘Sorry,’ says Lola, taking a quick picture of Belle looking grumpy. In about three seconds, she’s made her eyes su
per big, with purple devil horns sprouting out of her head.
Maisie giggles. Belle glares. I try not to laugh because when Belle’s in a bad mood, everyone is in a bad mood. You know those people?
‘Seriously, guys. We only get to be together for such a small amount of time now. We can’t waste it on screens,’ she says. ‘Maybe we should take Soph’s lead and all get rid of our phones.’
There’s an awkward pause and I can feel my face go hot again. I didn’t ditch my phone to, like, make a protest or lead a better life or make a stand against technology or anything. I did it to avoid talking to my dad. I did it so I wouldn’t have to talk to him after he left to live in the city and he called every night, over and over, and I never picked up because I was too mad at him to talk. And sometimes, when my mum’s old laptop is being super slow and FaceTime goes all wonky, I really regret it, too. I want to say all that, but it’s harder, these days, to say what’s in my heart. I just turn red and swallow, wishing things were different.
But then Lola winks at me, just at me, and I get a fizzy feeling, like maybe I’m not the worst human after all. The Lola Effect, I guess. ‘Stop being so bossy,’ she says to Belle.
Belle rolls her eyes. Lola rolls hers back.
‘Maisie, I’ve got some openings in my schedule these holidays,’ says Belle. ‘I could tutor you in maths – get you ahead enough to ace this term. I help Matilda all the time. She was homeschooled so she’s a little behind everyone else.’
‘Can you shut up about Matilda for two seconds?’ asks Lola. ‘Mais, what if you could practise gym somewhere else? Our basement’s pretty big. We could move Rishi’s drum kit. He wouldn’t mind.’
And he actually wouldn’t. Rishi is Lola’s big brother and he’s the kindest person I know. He’s in year nine and he’s teaching Maisie to play the drums. I could talk about him forever but I’ll shut up now.
‘Aw. That’s so nice,’ says Maisie, reaching for the cupcakes. ‘But I need equipment. The beam and all that. Are any of these red velvet, Soph? I love that cream-cheese icing that you … Oh.’ Maisie’s voice trails off because Lola and Belle are giving her death stares. Making red velvet cupcakes is something else I don’t do anymore.
‘Well, let’s park this issue for now,’ says Belle, which I think means ‘talk about something else’. ‘Item three: Sunnystream news. Do you know, since I’ve been gone someone’s torn down all the Say No To Straws posters?’ Belle says, outraged. ‘And have the Eco Worriers printed out any more? No. Sometimes I wonder what they do with their time.’
‘Well, most of them are only eight,’ says Lola, pulling a strawberry Chupa Chup out of her bag. ‘I’m guessing they’re still making up horse games and all that stuff.’
I miss making up games. I miss primary school and using skipping ropes to pretend we were horses-and-carriages. I miss Maisie teaching us gym tricks at lunch and walking on our hands around the library when Mrs Whiffin wasn’t looking – all the way from the front desk to the non-fiction section and back. I wonder if the others miss those things too, but it’s probably just me. I guess I haven’t really told you anything about myself, have I? I’m not really sure what to say because so much stuff in my life is different now. I wonder which part of me is still me.
But here are some things that are still the same. Apparently I have really big eyes, but big compared to what? I like to bake. I like to read. I love my friends. I’m the only one of us at Sunnystream High, the local school, and I hate it. I have a pug called Togsley and a GIANT rabbit, as big as a human baby, called Lemon Tart – well, I sort of do. She lives with Maisie at the moment. She’ll let you dress her up in anything you can think of.
‘Let’s brainstorm how to strengthen their community spirit and re-ignite the fire of social justice,’ says Belle.
‘That sounds boring,’ Lola says. (At least I think she does – the lollipop makes it hard to tell.)
Belle ignores her. ‘Just because I’m gone, doesn’t mean I’m gone, if you get what I mean. Sunnystream needs –’
‘Defenders of the future,’ we say together, because we’ve heard her say it a squillion times before.
‘Exactly. What’s happened around here? When was the last time Sunnystream held the annual Corner Park Hot Sausage Dog race?’ she says. ‘Or Slip N Slide Sundays?’
We all pause. She’s right. We didn’t even have one Slip N Slide Sunday last year. We didn’t do that in February, or have our Ape-ril Fools Photo, where the whole town crams onto the clubhouse verandah in monkey masks for a big photo that Mr Stavrianou, who runs the local paper, takes with his old film camera. We didn’t have Lettuce Be Married in June, either, which is where married people can come and renew their wedding vows in the vegetable patch of the clubhouse garden.
We turn to each other, realising at exactly the same time what’s going down in Sunnystream. And it isn’t good.
‘Mayor Magnus,’ we say. Belle glowers so much, her eyebrows practically join together.
Have you heard about this guy? He’s loud and rude and rich, and somehow last year he became the mayor of Sunnystream, though all the parents say they didn’t vote for him. Maybe he hypnotised them. Because before he was the mayor, he was a hypnotist who wore a purple sparkly cape. He made about a zillion dollars travelling around hypnotising people at shopping malls, and then he started building his own shopping centres. He called himself Sparky Mark but he’s changed that now to Mega Mayor, and he still wears the cape. Since he’s been in charge, he only cares about his #biggerisbetter! campaign, and so our Sunnystream traditions have started disappearing, little bit by little bit. Maybe that’s the reason it doesn’t feel as much like home anymore. Or one of the reasons, anyway.
‘Well, we’re going to do something about it,’ Belle says briskly.
‘Like drop a giant glitter bomb on his office,’ says Lola.
Belle glares at her with a ‘you’re not taking this seriously’ face.
‘But we only have the holidays,’ Maisie points out. ‘That’s just two weeks.’
‘A lot can happen in two weeks. We’ll schedule a separate meeting to discuss. Moving on to item four: One sentence of family gossip. I’ll go first. Francine is still dating Punk Sherman.’
‘No WAY!’ we say. Francine is Belle’s mum. Punk Sherman is her latest boyfriend – the forty-fifth since Belle’s dad left when she was three. Belle hates Punk Sherman, but then, she hates all her mum’s boyfriends. Punk Sherman has buck teeth and says he is a circus engineer. Belle thinks that’s just a cover story because he doesn’t have a job. Who on earth is a circus engineer? Sunnystream doesn’t even have a circus.
The other news is …
Lola: Her big brother, Rishi, and his band just got their first song on the radio. (Amazing!)
Maisie: Someone actually bought the pair of stuffed mongooses (mongeese?) from the antiques shop, which means we can’t use them as extras when we make our music videos anymore.
Me: My dad is still living in the city apartment.
‘Well, you never know, Soph. Maybe he’s actually just – hey, who are those guys?’ Lola asks, pointing towards the park, and from how interested she sounds, I bet one of them has a man bun. Or, at the very least, some kind of ponytail.
I turn to see four men in fluoro orange vests walking towards us. They stop by the clubhouse fence and one of them pulls a roll of orange tape from his pocket. He takes a while to find the end of the tape and I can tell Lola is about to offer to do it for him (she has really long nails) but then he finds it and wraps it around the fence rail.
Maisie and I look at each other like ‘what the heck?’.
‘Hi, I’m Lola,’ says Lola at the exact same time as Belle says, ‘Sir. What exactly are you doing?’
The old guy who’s just arrived looks a bit like Santa Claus except with an Akubra hat, and it seems like he’s in charge because he has a clipboard and a pen.
‘Top of the morning,’ he says to us, tipping his hat. ‘Just filling out the
paperwork. This grand old dame is getting pulled down soon.’ He waves his arm at the clubhouse, and the garden, and even the fence.
‘WHAT!?!’ we all say together.
Holy SMOKE.
‘Shocked’ does not even begin to describe this feeling. It’s like finding out someone is going to lasso the moon and drag it right out of the sky, and I have to blink hard so I don’t cry. Maisie crosses her arms and I think there might be tears in the corners of her eyes, too.
‘But the clubhouse is ours!’ says Lola, scrambling to her feet. ‘You can’t do that!’
‘Well, it’s not technically ours,’ says Belle, who likes us to be accurate. ‘But it is the beating heart of Sunnystream. Haven’t you read Sunnystream: A History?’ she asks Aussie Santa as she stands up too and puts her hands on her hips, which is called a power pose. ‘Without the clubhouse, we wouldn’t have a town. Back in 1897 –’
‘Just following orders here,’ he says. He sounds kind but also firm, like there’s no point in arguing with him. ‘I’m Steve Morrison, by the way. I’m the town’s building inspector.’
‘Isobelle Brodie,’ Belle says, stepping forward to shake his hand. I see him wince a little as she grabs it, just like our old primary-school principal used to when Belle won awards, which was practically every week. ‘A powerful handshake shows a powerful mind,’ she always says. I’ve practised with her before and literally felt the bones of my hand crunch together.
‘Doesn’t look much like the beating heart of anything,’ calls one of the guys with the tape, which is all the way around the fence now. The other guys snigger. HEY! I want to say, all fired up. It feels like he’s insulting my grandma or something.
